
Last summer, a 14-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by an asylum seeker in Epping and this small community was engulfed in protest. Can it recover?
When Sherzod* moved to Epping in 2025, he was dreaming of a little garden, long dog walks in the forest and more space to breathe. At 20, he had moved from Uzbekistan to the UK to study law, then lived in north London for decades. In his mid-40s, after establishing himself in a media job, he began visiting the forest – 5,900 acres of green lung saved by the Epping Forest Act 1878. The pretty shops of the old south-west Essex town delighted him. “I just liked the high street, I liked the people,” he says. “The people were really friendly.”
Epping was created by the canons of Waltham Abbey in the 13th century as a market town on the road from London to Cambridge. Its high street is still thriving. There is a Gail’s bakery and an M&S Food shop; the four-bed semis in the estate agents’ windows are listed at just shy of £1m.
Continue reading...The fearless 23-year-old is determined to keep a level head as he prepares to face Flavio Cobolli on Wednesday
A week ago, very few people knew who Arthur Fery was. But he has been propelled into the limelight as the last man standing after a disastrous start to Wimbledon for British players.
Fery, who is ranked No 114 in the world, defied expectations on Monday night when he triumphed on Centre Court over one of the top players for most of the past decade, the former world No 3 Grigor Dimitrov.
Continue reading...There are far better ways to tackle climate breakdown, but successive governments have chosen to listen to the fossil fuel companies instead
The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.
Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...In the fifth of a series on nationalisation, we look at utilities – including the cost of ending private ownership
When the former Undertones frontman turned campaigner Feargal Sharkey backed Keir Starmer for prime minister in 2024, he hoped that the Labour leader would be the man to clean up Britain’s polluted rivers and bring the water industry into public ownership – starting with troubled Thames Water.
Two years later, Sharkey has been disappointed. Now he is hoping that Andy Burnham will begin the job when he is confirmed as prime minister.
Continue reading...The beloved BBC sitcom is now a quarter of a century old. Ahead of two TV celebrations, here are 25 things you didn’t know about television’s funniest workplace mockumentary
Fetch the acoustic guitar and twiddle your TM Lewin tie because it’s the 25th anniversary of The Office. Yes, it’s a quarter of a century since we were introduced to Wernham Hogg paper company’s David Brent – a friend first, boss second, probably an entertainer third.
To commemorate the majestic mockumentary’s silver jubilee, actors Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook are reuniting to present a BBC documentary looking back at the show. Meanwhile, co-creator Ricky Gervais is releasing a retrospective special on his YouTube channel.
Continue reading...While the Reform leader casts himself as the victim questions about his finances are unlikely to disappear
For Nigel Farage, a year that was progressing quite nicely started to go wrong when the Guardian revealed he had received an undeclared gift of £5m from a crypto billionaire. Just 10 weeks later, he has been pushed into perhaps one of the biggest gambles of his political career.
That gamble is seemingly not with his role as an MP. Farage took more than 45% of the vote in Clacton in 2024, and the heavily Reform-friendly constituency was always likely to elect him again, even before all the other parties announced they would stand aside in a byelection they have dismissed as a stunt.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Bankers have raised potential money-laundering concerns over loans and donations involving senior party figures
A host of transactions involving Reform UK’s most senior figures and donations to the party caused bankers to report potential money-laundering concerns to the National Crime Agency, a Guardian investigation has found.
On Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that the undisclosed £5m gift provided to the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, by a cryptocurrency billionaire shortly before the 2024 general election was reported to the NCA.
One relates to a £1m donation made to Britain Means Business, a fundraising organisation for Reform UK, before the last general election. Half of the £1m was then transferred by Tice, as director of the company, to Reform UK. Renamed from Leave Means Leave, Britain Means Business is a company that is used to help fund Reform. The £1m seemingly came from the aristocrat and Reform UK donor Fiona Cottrell. In this instance, the Guardian understands bank staff were not satisfied that the funds had ultimately come from her. The NCA has sought help from a foreign partner agency to trace the original source of the funds.
Two other SARs relate to a loan from George Cottrell to Tice. The loan was made shortly before Tice finalised a property purchase and made a party donation, and was not repaid until after those two transactions were completed, according to sources. George Cottrell is the son of Fiona Cottrell, and is a convicted fraudster, former deputy treasurer of Ukip and close associate of Farage.
A fourth relates to the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne to Farage, which was first revealed by the Guardian in April.
Continue reading...President calls Iranian leadership ‘scum’, rails against alliance, repeats demand for Greenland and threatens Spain
Donald Trump has declared that the ceasefire with Iran is over as he arrived at the Nato summit in Ankara, launching an angry broadside in which he complained about the military alliance and repeated his demand for Greenland.
The US president, sitting alongside the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, called Iran’s leadership scum and “sick people”, and added that he was “very upset” with the alliance and even threatened to cut off all trade with Spain in a row over defence spending.
Continue reading...Ellis was executed in 1955 after fatally shooting her partner David Blakely
Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK, has been granted a conditional pardon in light of evidence that she was a victim of domestic abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour.
She was executed in 1955 after she shot and killed her partner, David Blakely, who she met while working in the nightclub she managed two years earlier.
Continue reading...Ndodana Mkhanyisi Tshuma, 45, believed to have left UK for Zimbabwe before bodies of partner and children were discovered
Police are hunting for a man after the deaths of his wife and two daughters in Bedfordshire.
Nothabo Zandile Tshuma, 42, known as Zandile, and Natalie, 15, and Nala, five, were found dead in a detached house in Great Denham, near Bedford, on Monday.
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